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In a Range of Tastes, Books to Inspire Redecorating

Home design books to read this fall.Credit
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

As temperatures drop and Canada geese catch thermals, one’s thoughts turn to redecorating for the indoor months ahead. This fall’s crop of home design books offers the usual inspiration and escapism.

In “Now I Sit Me Down: From Klismos to Plastic Chair: A Natural History,” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25), Witold Rybczynski chronicles a genre of furniture we never stop fussing over. Given astonishing form by the ancient Egyptians and perfected by the ancient Greeks, chairs eventually stretched, rocked and rolled. Designing an effective chair is never easy. “Any culture that decides to sit on chairs,” Mr. Rybczynski writes, “must come to terms with a challenging reality: human posture.”

The title and lists of Parisian vendors notwithstanding, there is nothing particularly French about Sarah Lavoine’s “Chez Moi: Decorating Your Home and Living Like a Parisienne” (Abrams Image, about $25). Except maybe the easygoing way in which Ms. Lavoine, a French design celebrity, appears to throw a room together with a bold stripe of wall paint here and a mosaic of floor tiles there. This book is most endearing when she gives etiquette advice — for example, never burden a hostess with flowers when you arrive at a party, but send a bouquet ahead of time.

Design

When Katie Ridder met Peter Pennoyer, it was an encounter of minds so unalike that the only reasonable outcome was marriage. Ms. Ridder, an interior designer, favors Moroccan textiles and flamboyant color, while Mr. Pennoyer, a classical architect, is all white columns, rigor and flow. Together, they built a Greek Revival-style retreat in Millbrook, N.Y, that is more than a sum of their philosophies. In “A House in the Country” (Vendome Press, $55), the building dazzles with purple tiled floors, 19th-century busts arrayed under star-patterned glass and an exterior frieze of dachshunds chasing a rabbit.

A 1983 visit to a flea market got John Derian started on his métier: decorating objects with scraps from vintage books and ephemera and selling them out of an East Village shop. “John Derian Picture Book” (Artisan, $75) reproduces 290 pieces of his source material on big lush pages. Many are prints from old instructional books, but there’s also a fragment of a 19th-century envelope with a Chicago postmark, violet marbleized endpapers and a bug drawn circa 1820 by an amateur entomologist.

A few pages into Janice Lyle’s “Sunnylands: America’s Midcentury Masterpiece” (Vendome Press, $60), we learn that the art-loving publisher and philanthropist Walter Annenberg invented the televised dance program “Dick Clark’s American Bandstand.” So imagine what treasures await in this history of his fabled midcentury modern house in Rancho Mirage, Calif., which is now restored and open to the public. Completed in 1966 by the architect A. Quincy Jones, with rare preserved interiors by William Haines, the 32,000-square-foot Sunnylands attracted presidents, royalty and Hollywood moguls to its glassy rooms with pale clusters of low furniture, meant to encourage “long-leg posing,” Ms. Lyle writes.

Among the works in “Alison Berger: Glass and Light” (Skira Rizzoli, $65) is a pendant lamp of woven glass. “During the day it hovers in space, almost disappearing like a cobweb that goes unnoticed in the house until the light strikes it a certain way,” Ms. Berger writes. “At night, the glass recedes even further, and shadows come boldly forward as vivid as a drawing on the wall.” In her work, she evokes astrolabes, apothecary jars and other relics from the dawn of science.